Young Men and Fire

by Norman Maclean

  Both Sallee and Rumsey record briefly the crew’s meeting with Dodge and Harrison after those two had left the front of the fire. Sallee reports Dodge as saying that all of them “had better get out of that thick reproduction” because “it was a death trap” and then instructing Hellman to return the crew to the north side of the gulch and head them down the canyon to the river. Rumsey and Sallee agree Dodge didn’t look particularly worried: “Dodge has a characteristic in him,” Rumsey told the Board. “It is hard to tell what he is thinking.” And Dodge probably wasn’t yet alarmed, since he told Hellman that, while the crew was proceeding toward the river, he and Harrison would return to the cargo area at the head of the gulch and, as the others had already done, eat something before starting on the trail.

  Still, it is clear Dodge hadn’t cared for what he saw when he took a look at the front of the fire. He said it was not possible to get closer to the flames than one hundred feet and the “thick reproduction” he was worried about was a thicket of second-growth Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir that had sprung up after an earlier fire and was tightly interlaced and highly explosive, especially with the wind blowing upgulch. Primarily, the retreat to the river was for the safety of the crew, but if the wind continued to blow upgulch, the crew could attack the lower end of the fire from its rear or flanks to keep it from spreading, especially into Meriwether Canyon, which, like a good chimney, drew a strong updraft. If worse came to worst and the wind changed and blew downgulch, the crew could always escape into the river.

  Dodge gave Hellman still another order—not to take the crew down the bottom of the gulch but to “follow contour” on the other slope, by which he meant that the crew should stay on the sidehill and keep on an elevation from which they could always see how the main fire on the opposite side was developing.

  Hellman led the crew across the gulch and started angling for the river, and, sure enough, it happened as it nearly always does when the second-in-command takes charge. The crew got separated and confused—considering the short time Dodge was gone, highly confused and separated by quite a distance. Sallee says they ended up in two groups, five hundred feet apart, far enough apart that they couldn’t see each other, and so confused that Sallee’s group thought they were in the rear only to have to stop and wait for the rear group to catch up. Rumsey says that part of the time Navon, the former paratrooper from Bastogne, was in the lead. He was the one really professional jumper—and professional adventurer—among them and evidently was always something of his own boss and boss of the whole outfit if it looked to him as if it needed one.

  This is all that happened in the twenty minutes Dodge was gone. But instead of being just a lunch break for the boss, it also was something of a prelude to the end. At least it can make us ask ahead of time what the structure of a small outfit should be when its business is to meet sudden danger and prevent disaster.

  In the Smokejumpers the foreman is nearly always in the lead and the second-in-command is in the rear. On the march, the foreman sizes up the situation, makes the decision, yells back the orders, picks the trail, and sets the pace. The second-in-command repeats the orders, sees that they’re understood, and sees that the crew is always acting as a crew, which means seeing that the crew is carrying out the boss’s orders. When they hit a fire, the foreman again is out in front deciding where the fire-line should go and the second-in-command is again in the rear. He repeats the foreman’s orders, he pats his men on the back or yells at them, and only if he can’t himself get them to do what they should does he yell to the foreman, “They’re making lousy line.”

  Although the foreman has little direct contact with his men, even on a friendly basis, his first job is to see that his men are safe. He is always asking himself, Where is a good escape route?

  It is easy to forget about the second-in-command, who has a real tough job. He is the one who has to get the yardage out of the men, so he has to know how to pat them or yell at them and when. He has to know his men and up to a point be one of them, but he has to know where that point is. Being second in command, he will have a hard time, especially when he first takes command. A little friendship goes a long way when it comes to command, and they say Hellman was a wonderful fellow, but that may be part of the reason why, when he first took command, the outfit became separated and confused.

  It could also have been partly the crew’s fault. Now that they weren’t going to hit the fire head on, some of the excitement was gone. Fighting a fire from its rear is not unusual, but it doesn’t show how much horsepower you have. The crew, though, was still happy. They were not in that high state of bliss they had been in when they expected to have the fire out by tomorrow morning and possibly be home that same night to observe tall dames top-heavy with beer topple off bar stools. On the other hand, attacking the fire from the rear would make the job last longer and mean more money, and, in a Smokejumper’s descending states of happiness, after women comes overtime. Actually, the priority could be the other way around. To the crew the fire was nothing to worry about.

  Dodge felt otherwise as he and Harrison sat eating at the cargo area near the head of the canyon, from where he could see almost to the river. He told the Board of Review, “The fire had started to boil up, and I figured it was necessary to rejoin my crew and try to get out of the canyon as soon as possible.”

  He picked up a can of Irish white potatoes and caught up to his crew roughly twenty minutes after he had left them. It was “about 5:40,” according to his testimony. Dodge had Hell-man collect the crew, then station himself at the end of the line to keep it together this time while he himself took the lead and headed for the river. Things went fast from then on but never fast enough for the crew to catch up and keep ahead of disaster.

  Rod Norum, who is one of the leading specialists on fire behavior in the Forest Service and still a fine athlete, as an experiment started out where Dodge rejoined his crew and, moving as fast as possible all the way, did not get to the grave markers as fast as the bodies did. Of course, there was nothing roaring behind him.

  WHEN THE CREW CROSSED BACK from the south to the north side of Mann Gulch where they had landed, they crossed from one geography into another and from one fire hazard into one they had never dealt with before. Mann Gulch is a composition in miniature of the spectacular change in topography that is pressed together by the Gates of the Mountains. Suddenly the Great Plains disappear; suddenly the vast Rocky Mountains begin. Between them, there is only a gulch or two like Mann Gulch for a transition from one world to another. Before the fire the two sides of Mann Gulch almost evenly divided the two topographical and fuel worlds between them—a side of the gulch for each world. The south side, where the fire had started, was heavily timbered. In the formal description of the Report of Board of Review: “At the point of origin of the fire the fuel type consisted of a dense stand of six- to eight-inch-diameter Douglas fir and some ponderosa pine on the lateral ridges.”

  But it was a different type of fuel on the north side, where the crew was now on its way to the river. “At the point of disaster the tree cover consisted of stringers of scattered young ponderosa pine trees with occasional overmature ponderosa pine trees. The ground cover or understory which predominated was bunch grass with some cheat grass.” Essentially the north side of Mann Gulch was rocky and steep with a lot of grass and brush and only a scattering of trees. The south side was densely timbered.

  The difference between the two sides of the gulch is after all these years still clearly visible. On the south side the charred trees stood until their roots rotted. Then winds blowing upgulch from the Missouri left them on the ground, un-buried but paralleling each other, as if they belonged to some nature cult ultimately joined together by the belief that death lay in the same direction. At times they look as if they had been placed there—black-draped coffins from some vast battle awaiting burial in a national cemetery on a hillside near a great river, if not the Potomac then the Missouri.

  On the north s
ide, where the crew was angling toward the river, there are white crosses with bronze plates and a few black odds and ends. Not much else. The men died in dead grass on the north slope.

  Several generalizations will help with what lies ahead if we remember that they are only generalizations. A fire in dense timber builds up terrific heat but not great speed. As Harry Gisborne has said, a big run for a crown fire is from half a mile to a mile an hour. A grass fire, by comparison, is usually a thin fire; it builds up no great wall of heat—it comes and is gone, sometimes so fast that the top of the grass is scarcely burned. Sometimes so fast it doesn’t even stop to burn a homesteader’s log cabin. It just burns over and around it, and doesn’t take time to wait for the roof to catch on fire. Even so, since the great fire catastrophe of 1910, far more men had been killed by 1949 on fast, thin-fueled grass fires east of the Continental Divide in Montana than on the slow, powerful fires in the dense forests of western Montana.

  Arthur D. Moir, Jr., supervisor of the Helena National Forest, generalizing in his 1949 testimony about the Mann Gulch fire, said fires east of the Continental Divide in Montana “are smaller, and because of less fuel, are more quickly controlled.” But he went on to add that to his knowledge “only two men have been burned in forest fires in Idaho and western Montana since 1910,” whereas he counted thirty-five who had burned to death east of the Divide in fast grass.

  The grass and brush of Mann Gulch could not be faster than it was now. The year before the fire, the Gates of the Mountains had been designated a wilderness area, so no livestock grazed in Mann Gulch, with the result that the grass in places was waist high. Since it was early August with blistering heat, the worst of both fire-worlds could occur—if a fire started in the deep timber of the southern side, where most fires start, and then jumped to the explosive grass and shrubs of the northern side, as this one might, and did, it could burn with the speed of one of those catastrophic fires in the dry gulches of suburban Los Angeles but carry with it the heat of the 1910 timber fires of Montana and Idaho. It could run so fast you couldn’t escape it and it could be so hot it could burn out your lungs before it caught you.

  Things got faster and shorter. Dodge says they continued downgulch about five minutes, Sallee says between an eighth and a quarter of a mile, which is saying about the same thing. Dodge was worried—evidently no one else was. The fire was just across the gulch to be looked at, and that’s evidently what they were doing. They were high enough up the slope now that they could almost peer into its insides. When the smoke would lift, they could see flames flapping fiercely back and forth, a damn bad sign but they found it interesting.

  Navon was in his element as a freewheeler, alternating between being benevolent and being boss. He had lightened Rumsey’s load by trading him his saw for Rumsey’s heavier water can, so Rumsey especially was watching the scenery as it went by. He observed that the fire was burning “more fiercely” than before. “A very interesting spectacle,” he told the Board of Review. “That was about all we thought about it.”

  Of the stations of the cross they were to pass, this was the aesthetic one. On forest fires there are moments almost solely for beauty. Such moments are of short duration.

  THEN DODGE SAW IT. Rumsey and Sallee didn’t, and probably none of the rest of the crew did either. Dodge was thirty-three and foreman and was supposed to see; he was in front where he could see. Besides, he hadn’t liked what he had seen when he looked down the canyon after he and Harrison had returned to the landing area to get something to eat, so his seeing powers were doubly on the alert. Rumsey and Sallee were young and they were crew and were carrying tools and rubbernecking at the fire across the gulch. Dodge takes only a few words to say what the “it” was he saw next: “We continued down the canyon for approximately five minutes before I could see that the fire had crossed Mann Gulch and was coming up the ridge toward us.”

  Neither Rumsey nor Sallee could see the fire that was now on their side of the gulch, but both could see smoke coming toward them over a hogback directly in front. As for the main fire across the gulch, it still looked about the same to them, “confined to the upper third of the slope.”

  At the Review, Dodge estimated they had a 150- to 200-yard head start on the fire coming at them on the north side of the gulch. He immediately reversed direction and started back up the canyon, angling toward the top of the ridge on a steep grade. When asked why he didn’t go straight for the top there and then, he answered that the ground was too rocky and steep and the fire was coming too fast to dare to go at right angles to it.

  You may ask yourself how it was that of the crew only Rumsey and Sallee survived. If you had known ahead of time that only two would survive, you probably never would have picked these two—they were first-year jumpers, this was the first fire they had ever jumped on, Sallee was one year younger than the minimum age, and around the base they were known as roommates who had a pretty good time for themselves. They both became big operators in the world of the woods and prairies, and part of this story will be to find them and ask them why they think they alone survived, but even if ultimately your answer or theirs seems incomplete, this seems a good place to start asking the question. In their statements soon after the fire, both say that the moment Dodge reversed the route of the crew they became alarmed, for, even if they couldn’t see the fire, Dodge’s order was to run from one. They reacted in seconds or less. They had been traveling at the end of the line because they were carrying unsheathed saws. When the head of the line started its switchback, Rumsey and Sallee left their positions at the end of the line, put on extra speed, and headed straight uphill, connecting with the front of the line to drop into it right behind Dodge.

  They were all traveling at top speed, all except Navon. He was stopping to take snapshots.

  THE WORLD WAS GETTING FASTER, smaller, and louder, so much faster that for the first time there are random differences among the survivors about how far apart things were. Dodge says it wasn’t until one thousand to fifteen hundred feet after the crew had changed directions that he gave the order for the heavy tools to be dropped. Sallee says it was only two hundred yards, and Rumsey can’t remember. Whether they had traveled five hundred yards or two hundred yards, the new fire coming up the gulch toward them was coming faster than they had been going. Sallee says, “By the time we dropped our packs and tools the fire was probably not much over a hundred yards behind us, and it seemed to me that it was getting ahead of us both above and below.” If the fire was only a hundred yards behind now, it had gained a lot of ground on them since they had reversed directions, and Rumsey says he could never remember going faster in his life than he had for the last five hundred yards.

  Dodge testifies that this was the first time he had tried to communicate with his men since rejoining them at the head of the gulch, and he is reported as saying—for the second time—something about “getting out of this death trap.” When asked by the Board of Review if he had explained to the men the danger they were in, he looked at the Board in amazement, as if the Board had never been outside the city limits and wouldn’t know sawdust if they saw it in a pile. It was getting late for talk anyway. What could anybody hear? It roared from behind, below, and across, and the crew, inside it, was shut out from all but a small piece of the outside world.

  They had come to the station of the cross where something you want to see and can’t shuts out the sight of everything that otherwise could be seen. Rumsey says again and again what the something was he couldn’t see. “The top of the ridge, the top of the ridge.

  “I had noticed that a fire will wear out when it reaches the top of a ridge. I started putting on steam thinking if I could get to the top of the ridge I would be safe.

  “I kept thinking the ridge—if I can make it. On the ridge I will be safe…. I forgot to mention I could not definitely see the ridge from where we were. We kept running up since it had to be there somewhere. Might be a mile and a half or a hundred feet—I had no idea.�
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  The survivors say they weren’t panicked, and something like that is probably true. Smokejumpers are selected for being tough, but Dodge’s men were very young and, as he testified, none of them had been on a blowup before and they were getting exhausted and confused. The world roared at them—there was no safe place inside and there was almost no outside. By now they were short of breath from the exertion of their climbing and their lungs were being seared by the heat. A world was coming where no organ of the body had consciousness but the lungs.

  Dodge’s order was to throw away just their packs and heavy tools, but to his surprise some of them had already thrown away all their equipment. On the other hand, some of them wouldn’t abandon their heavy tools, even after Dodge’s order. Diettert, one of the most intelligent of the crew, continued carrying both his tools until Rumsey caught up with him, took his shovel, and leaned it against a pine tree. Just a little farther on, Rumsey and Sallee passed the recreation guard, Jim Harrison, who, having been on the fire all afternoon, was now exhausted. He was sitting with his heavy pack on and was making no effort to take it off, and Rumsey and Sallee wondered numbly why he didn’t but no one stopped to suggest he get on his feet or gave him a hand to help him up. It was even too late to pray for him. Afterwards, his ranger wrote his mother and, struggling for something to say that would comfort her, told her that her son always attended mass when he could.

  It was way over one hundred degrees. Except for some scattered timber, the slope was mostly hot rock slides and grass dried to hay.